The Beginning Guitarist's Book - Level One

by Chris Kalkbrenner and Tom Hess

This is the book I wish I had started learning from when I was a beginner! After many years of teaching thousands of students, I have come to understand the very best strategies for beginning guitar students to develop their skills, in the shortest amount of time and with the greatest progress.

Using this book, beginning guitar students progress much faster because:

• The songs and exercises in the book are easy to learn.
   
• The songs and exercises in the book sound cool and are fun to learn… in other words, they don't suck the way they do in virtually all the traditional beginner guitar books teachers use with their students.
   
• The techniques, concepts and ideas taught in this book are designed using the innovative Geometric Guitar Teaching Method™ in order to effectively help beginner guitar students progress easier, faster and better compared to learning via the obsolete, outdated and linear guitar teaching methods of the past.
  
  The vast majority of guitar teachers teach beginning guitar students in a logical linear way. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t work well for beginners. Students progress slowly, or give up, leaving both teachers and students very frustrated. Reading this, you may think: ‘But all books for beginning guitar students are written in this way?’ You are right, they are written in a very logical linear way, and this is a huge part of the problem. The linear teaching approach makes perfect sense if you are teaching a topic that is linear such as mathematics or science, but you are teaching music - an art that requires a different method to teaching and learning. Yet the conventional way beginner books are written (and the conventional way beginning students are taught) is typically very linear. When some teachers realize that it doesn’t work, they start to not use any book at all and instead make their own attempt to teaching beginning students with their own version of the linear teaching approach. This often produces mediocre results… some teachers simply ‘accept’ those mediocre results, while others begin searching (again) for a better method of teaching beginners that will work all (or at least most) of the time. I specifically developed the Geometric Guitar Teaching Method™ to solve this widespread problem.

• Unlike traditional guitar teaching books, this book focuses entirely on the important things that will help the beginning guitar student to quickly learn to play guitar. Contrary to the myth that some guitar teachers and students believe, learning to read music notation is NOT one of these things. In fact, it has been proven that learning to read music notation will only make learning to play guitar much harder and take far longer for a beginning guitar student! Beginning guitar students need to focus their attention and learning on the physical demands of learning to play guitar and on self evaluation of what they are trying to play. However, if that student 'also' has to be focused on the demanding task of learning and memorizing music notation, then the student's entire progress will slow down - which will also lead to massive amounts of frustration for both guitar students and teachers. Learning to read music notation can be a valuable skill, however it should be learned later in a student's development, NOT as a beginner.

The techniques used in my Beginning Guitarist's Book have proven over and over again to advance beginners to the next level easily and fast! If you are a guitar student reading this page, I recommend using this book with the aid of a teacher to guide you through the materials as quickly and effectively as possible!